Presents a contemporary philosophical reading of the American Psychological Association Memories of Childhood Abuse report. First, background on the nature of the report is given and then the philosophical approach taken towards the reading itself is discussed. The "philosophical reading" of the report is not an attempt to resolve the debate and the authors therefore do not take sides. Instead, the authors read the document as a disciplinary cultural artifact—a resource about psychology as a theoretical, epistemological, cultural, and political enterprise—rather (...) than simply a statement of contemporary knowledge on memories of child abuse. In the critical reading of the Report, 4 themes are highlighted that characterize the approach of both the clinical and research subgroup, and thus the Report as a whole. These 4 themes are problematic grounding in positivist science, problematic understanding of memory as monism and mechanism, problematic understanding of truth, and a problematic view of a disciplinary community. In the presentation of each theme, the authors speak to the implications of the theme, both for what psychology has been and for what it could become. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This volume, edited by three leading proponents and practitioners of human science psychology, serves as an invitation to readers new to this approach while also renewing that invitation to those who have long embraced and advanced research in the field from this perspective. It is a timely and important invitation. In 2009, the American Psychological Association declared psychology to be a core STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) discipline and advocated the teaching and practice of psychology with this natural science understanding (...) in mind, but in 2014 further reaffirmed alternative methods by adding a new journal, Qualitative Psychology. The varied essays in this volume, certainly, bolster the view that a purely STEM-centered vision would ignore much about the very experience of being human.In fact, it would be dangerous to rely solely on the methods of the natural sciences to study human beings, who operate in the realm of meanings, lived experience, and complex and complicated relationships with self and others. We create societies and belief systems, orient ourselves in time, experience beauty and pain. The Qualitative Vision for Psychology: An Invitation to a Human Science Approach argues that because we have aspects that are distinctly and uniquely human -- we are not rats, hydrogen, or rocks, for example -- this necessitates a distinctly human science, one that regards persons as humans rather than objects of study. The laws and formulas of the natural sciences simply do not take into account that particularly human way of being in the world.There are few comprehensive books on psychology conceived as a human science, even though it has a long history with roots in phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, and hermeneutics. In recent years, as these essays discuss, the field has been transformed through its contact with feminism, critical historical analysis, and deconstruction, and it has continued to examine new challenges. Further, we see here its specific applicability to issues as diverse as empathy, cultural history, apartheid, sexual assault, fetishes, and our natural environment. (shrink)